Curtis DVD1093 DVD Player with HDMI

1/10 Curtis DVD1093

markosjal@... - 04/20/09  (Edited: 04/20/09)

I have spent months testing DVD players with DIX and USB ports. For a while I was taking DIVX CDs to stores and testing , mostly Phillips DVD players. When I made the decision what to buy, guess what, out of stock. But a trip to WalMart the other day dealt me a surprise while browsing the DVD players. A Curtis DVD player that at first I thought had no USB port, but the box did say DIVX/Xvid. On closer inspection I found a USB port on the side of the unit. Wouldn't you know it , only 6 in stock and not even a USB memory with me, let alone a DIVX on DVD. Now Curtis seemed to me a brand only heard of years ago on game shows on TV. Naturally because of this I was reluctant One of my requirements is multiregion, as I have region 1 and 4 and even a few Asian DVDs from time to time from a friend. This unit is region 1 only. I went back the next day to WalMart to return one of the items I had bouight the previous day, and still some of these units were in stock. I bought one! I currently have a dedicated Media Player drive which I play most of my Divx videos on, so I went into this pretty much knoiwing what to expect as it relates to DIVX and USB When I unpacked the unit, I went through the normal set up. For initial testing and thus far I have tested only with Svideo. There was a time while going through the setup however where I selected a HD display option, (as this unit upscales up to 1080p .See later comments in discrepancies related to this model) and found that i could do nothing to get any video out , until I connected a composite monitor as apparently composite always outputs no matter what the HD settings are. Not true with the Svideo settings, contrary to what the manual says. I later tested some DVDs and sure enough as labeled , it is region 1 only, but I did find a Queen video with a sticker on the box saying Region 4 (no printed on the label) that played. I also know this video is PAL , and it played back fine. I even have some DVDs that I consistently had playback problems with since they were new and having tested on other entry level DVD players always had stuttering issues. The played back fine on this unit. Now for the real test. I connected a USB Hard disk (DVD supports only USB 1.1 according to the box) and all of the AVI files from my media drive played back fine through the USB port. In fact, They played back better when it came to rescaling. Most videos filled the screen to 90% whereas on the dedicated media drive video output some odd sized videos left black bars at the top and sides of the picture. SO FAR SO GOOD! So now I tried some other DIVX videos saved on CD-R, and knowing that one was 960x540 (16x9) , Battlestar.Galactica.(2004).4x06.Faith.HR.HDTV.XviD.[tvu.org.ru].avi, PLAYS FINE!WOW technically I believe this to be HD resolution the resolution considering I was looking at Svideo we very good. I am a former Broadcast Engineer and consider my eye particularly discriminating when it comes to video quality. I am anxious to see this video at 1080P . I will download some even higher res videos to see where this unit tops out DIVX multi channel audio in AVI is supported. Have not yet tested other formats such as MOV OGM , etc, but I would nit expect them to function. Also untested is DIVX subtitles. CONS: No DTS Lousy menus for USB Disk. All files seem to be ordered by numbers which seem to correspond to the date the file was written, not alphabetical. All folders show up on the root, so nested folders do not show up as nested. Some documentation is inaccurate USB hub with 2 disks did not work. Only one drive at a time was visible to the DVD No region free hack found yet. Please note There are discrepancies in this model. Most of the pictures I see on searches for this model do not resemble the unit I have. My unit however does resemble the unit here , except for the rear panel connections are ordered differently. http://www.curtisint.com/web/browser.asp?productID=DVD1093&catName=&brand=CURTIS&manual=DVD1093 OVERALL Great buy at 50 dollars with HDMI and 1080P upscaling